GB U20 finish 5th at Euro’s

The Great Britain U20 squad finished the Division B European Championships strong to take 5th place.

Great Britain were in Group C with Lithuania and Israel where the top two teams would go through to the next stage of playing for 1-8 place.

The first game saw a lose to Lithuania 42-61 despite a game high of 24 points from Kennedy Leonard which meant a must win was to happen against Israel to keep the chance of promotion alive. Two days later GB put in a great performance, again led by Leonard who tallied 22 points but the star of the show was Abigail Johnson who went for a monster double double of 11 points and 16 rebounds to get a 70-54 win against Israel.

This set up for a next round game against powerhouse Slovenia which was always going to be a tough task. Unfortunately Team GB found it hard to get going where their opponents frustrated and limited Leonard to just 6 points coming up short 50-69 which meant now the highest finish was now 4th place.

The next game was against Montenegro which didn’t go well for the team who fell 58-75 in a game where they would have felt they should have won but it wasn’t to be. This meant 5th was the higher place and a task that needed the squad to pull together and finish the tournament on a high.

This is exactly what happened as GB put in a hammering of Romania 42-62 behind WBBL duo of Savannah Wilkinson’s best game with 16 points and Georgia Gayle with 12. This now lined up a rematch to play against Montenegro where the squad were firing on all cylinders to get revenge with a 63-46 win behind Wilkinson again with 15 points, supported by Gayle (12) and Gabby Nikitinaite (10).

The final position of fifth place and a record of 3-3 represents an improvement last summer at the event, which harvested one victory. Notably two of the three defeats this time around came against the two strongest and already promoted teams in Lithuania and Slovenia.